This application claims priority to and is a continuation of application Ser. No. 11/838,260 filed Aug. 14, 2007 now U.S. Pat. No. 7,827,346 which in turn claims priority to provisional patent application 60/822,356 as filed Aug. 14, 2006 and entitled “Data Storage Device”, both of which are incorporated by reference in their entirety.
The present invention related generally to storage devices and more particularly to a solid state disk storage devices.
Integrated circuits are used in a wide variety of electronics and electronic equipment. Currently NAND Flash devices are used mainly in memory sticks and consumer products, such as IPODs, digital cameras, settop boxes and the like. These are mainly 1-2 NAND Flash devices per application. Typically a flash drive is a NAND-type flash memory integrated with a USB interface and used as a removable data storage device such as a flash drive, USB Key and thumb drive. It is typically powered by a USB connection and does not require an external power source or battery power source.
Applications that require large amounts of storage typically use 1.8 inch or larger hard drives to achieve their goals. Hard drives are mechanical, unreliable, relatively slow and consume more power than solid state disks. Until now, there has not been a solid state disk that can displace smaller hard drives (HD's). Another problem with the prior art HD is that they have moving parts, are slow and unreliable. In contrast, the present invention provides no mechanically moving parts, is extremely reliable as it guarantees data retention, can be erased and reprogrammed <100,000 times, are orders of magnitude faster than the fastest HD and consume much less power than HDs. The present invention also provides a higher level of data integrity than HDs. A flash drive can sustain only a limited number of write/erase cycles before failure. This makes the flash drive undesirable for running application software such as Excel®, Word® and Photoshop®. Also, a prior art flash drive would be precluded from running most operating systems that operate on the hard drive.
Accordingly, what is needed is a device and methods that has no moving parts, is reliable, consumes less power and adds low-cost high performance memory to a wide variety of electronic equipment.